The poet ponders the nature of God, stating “I do not doubt God is good, well-meaning, kind.” While he accepts God’s wisdom in most puzzling matters of life and death, he is confounded by the contradiction of his own plight in a racist society:

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm,...